Hiding in the Shadows, Scavenging for Clues in Every Drawer

Image

Thief The fourth in a series that essentially invented the genre, this new stealth game involves some Nazi-like, steampunk despots.CreditBH Impact

By Chris Suellentrop

Feb. 25, 2014

On a widely discussed and admired recent episode of HBO’s “True Detective,” Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, escaped from drug dealers, white supremacists and law enforcement through a series of improbable actions. He hid between two scraggly bushes, sneaked beneath a clothesline, paused behind a tree trunk, dashed into the shadowy section of a street and occasionally persuaded his pursuers to give up the chase by beating them into submission. At one point, Cohle waited quietly, gun aloft, against a wall as four armed men burst from a nearby door — only to run in the opposite direction.

Cinephiles and television critics praised the scene’s composition, an uninterrupted, six-minute tracking shot that recalled the work of directors like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. My reaction was different: Did I just witness a live-action re-enactment of a level from a stealth video game?

The rapturous reception for that “True Detective” sequence primed me to be more forgiving of the many flaws in Thief, a new video game that was released on Tuesday. It’s the fourth title in a series that essentially invented the stealth genre as we now understand it and that influenced later games like Splinter Cell and Dishonored. (The Metal Gear series also helped to pioneer the stealth game, as did arcade games like Pac-Man and Frogger.)

Image

A scene from Thief.CreditBH Impact

In a stealth game, the player’s task is, for the most part, to avoid enemies rather than to confront them with violence. Like Cohle’s antagonists on “True Detective,” those enemies sometimes behave in ridiculous ways, perhaps by ignoring your character as he runs right behind them or by shrugging off the discovery of an unconscious colleague after 30 seconds of cursory investigation. Yet, like the effect of that virtuosic tracking shot, the gestalt of the experience can overcome the eye-rolling aspects.

And the new Thief is a surprisingly entertaining game, laden with locks to pick, tunnels to crawl through and secret passageways to explore. Thief is for players who are content tourists, who enjoy eavesdropping on conversations to completion to uncover secrets, who are willing to scavenge a crawl space for a letter that, once read, reveals the combination to a nearby safe. Peering inside a closet might find another set of numbers carved in the wood.

To get the most out of the game, you need to have the patience — and the desire — to open and close, without exaggeration, hundreds of desk drawers while on the hunt for loot. You must wait motionless while a guard passes by as you prepare to douse a torch with water to give you the cover of darkness.

Image

Thief is laden with locks to pick.CreditBH Impact

Silly things do happen. Once, I cowered in a greenhouse while four guards entered, one after the other, and allowed me to club them until, at last, I had an empty courtyard to explore. But this absurdity was offset by the many ways I could choose to enter the nearby mansion — through an attic crawl space reached by a ladder, through a door reached by climbing a rope onto a balcony, or through an underground passage in that same greenhouse. A sublimely creepy asylum level is equally wonderful.

Thief rewards exploration, not action. I found all the rummaging and tunnel-hunting gratifying enough to overlook the comically awful story, which involves some Nazi-like, steampunk despots ruled by a man called the Baron who wants to harness the power of a force called the Primal. The Baron’s enforcer, the Thief-Taker General, is a sort of Dr. Evil-meets-Wile E. Coyote figure who lectures Garrett, the protagonist who is controlled by the player, about his villainous plans only to be confounded by a well-placed sofa.

The game is marred by technical defects, too, including shoddily edited breaks between the player’s thieving and the scripted scenes that give narrative meaning to the actions. And, infuriatingly, the player must stare at loading screens time and again while exploring Garrett’s city, which makes his wandering of the streets feel gated rather than open-ended.

Image

There are tunnels and secret passageways to explore in Thief.CreditBH Impact

The controls are also awkward, though interestingly so, in a way that nudges the player to inhabit Garrett as a nimble and weak thief rather than a forceful combatant. In the opening hour or so, I thought Thief’s controls felt backward, reversed from how most video games map character behavior onto a game pad. Swinging at enemies was especially frustrating, because that action was initiated by the right shoulder button, above the trigger, an undesirable spot for any activity. This is doubly true on the Xbox One, whose controllers have shoulder buttons that are stiff and unpleasant to click.

But as the game designer Cliff Bleszinski once explained, the “A” button on a controller is Park Place or Boardwalk, the most desirable real estate. If you want your players to do something (jump, shoot, punch), make that action respond to the “A” button, the one closest to players’ thumbs. On a PlayStation controller, the “X” button is in the same position.

In Thief, pressing “A” makes Garrett “swoop,” a quiet dash across a room, from one shadow to another. He is a runner, not a fighter.

Thief, developed for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix, is rated M (Mature, for players 17 and older). It has profanity, arrows that choke people and a brothel filled with naked people who moan very loudly.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Hiding in the Shadows, Scavenging for Clues in Every Drawer. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe